Barbarian Saga: The Beastmaster - Switch Review

Barbarian Saga: The Beastmaster is the latest metroidvania to hit the virtual shelves on the Nintendo Switch. Described as a hand-drawn 2.5D adventure game, Spanish developer Dormidin Studio made their debut and I have to say it looks intriguing. Some of the greatest recent metroidvania games have been developed in Spain: the Blasphemous games, Aeterna Noctis, to name a few. Will this live up to those high standards?

The Good

Barbarian Saga: The Beastmaster is set in the world of Arborea, where animal-like beings live and work. You play as Ren, who, as the name suggests, is able to tame and then take on various animal forms. Ren begins in his ‘normal’ form and the progression works by defeating bosses and unlocking a new animal form for him to morph into, which then serves to help unlock new areas. So it is very much a metroidvania, and using animal types to explore is at least pretty original. The general environment art is absolutely beautiful and high-detail, and this carries over into the character art as well. The design of Ren himself and the various friends and foes he meets along the way all look pretty bad-ass.

Barbarian Saga: The Beastmaster is clearly inspired by Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (in fact, one could argue that the trees that serve as save and fast-travel points look a bit TOO MUCH like the wak-wak trees in Prince of Persia). The character movement is similar, as is the field-of-view and the size of Ren on screen. The aforementioned trees are also fairly spread across the game map, meaning that while the combat and traversal IS pretty tough, you never feel too far away from a checkpoint, and the relief when you make it to one is palpable but satisfying. Ren uses a sword (the Heart-Eater) to begin with, but this can soon be upgraded as and when you unlock more animal forms, and you can also find spells and weapons along the way. The devs do a pretty good job of difficulty scaling; you can feel it getting progressively harder but I never felt like I was in an irretrievable situation.

Being a metroidvania, Barbarian Saga: The Beastmaster requires an element of backtracking. I personally didn’t mind this because, as stated earlier, the environments are pretty easy on the eye. Luckily it all runs pretty smoothly too, and the loading times between areas and when fast-travelling between trees are all pretty seamless.

TL;DR

• Environment and character art is on point
• Difficult but not punishing 
• Minimal load times when moving around the map

The Bad

It’s not all plain sailing in Barbarian Saga: The Beastmaster, sadly. It looks good, but some of the sound FX are pretty cheap, and when Ren jumps on some surfaces, it sounds like an SNES game. The enemy cries as well and feels a bit… off-the-shelf. That, coupled with some silly "your"/"you're" grammatical mistakes in the text (there is no VO), makes it feel a bit unpolished.

In addition to this, the way health is managed feels a bit uninspired in Barbarian Saga: The Beastmaster. Ren has a health bar (denoted by a horizontal sword in the top-left corner), and the only way to replenish your health is through potions, which you can either find in the map (but collect them once and they’re gone) or purchase from merchants with coins. Some enemies DO drop health replenishment items but they recover very minimal amounts of the health bar and are basically ineffective. It just ended up that some particularly tricky areas of the map felt gated behind farming coins, which you obtain from defeating enemies and then buying a load of health potions. Perhaps some are reading this thinking, ‘Well, duh, that’s normal,' but the tactic of farming currency and then spamming health potions is needed pretty much from the off, and it felt a bit dull.

TL;DR

• Cheap-sounding sound FX
• Health replenishment is mostly gated behind currency farming

Final Score: 7/10

I was really on the fence between a 7 and an 8 for Barbarian Saga: The Beastmaster. That might sound like small beer, but I think those scores hold very different perceptions. I went for a 7 in the end because, while I mostly enjoyed my time in Arborea and the environments and characters are gorgeous, there were significant elements that felt clunky and/or derivative, but these could be fixed with some tweaking and patching over time.

Thank you for checking out our Barbarian Saga: The Beastmaster Switch review, thank you to Selecta Play for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

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